Asana is our project management tool of choice at ecomloop. We use it to manage in-house projects and communications, and often when working on client projects. It's served us incredibly well from the beginning and has been flexible to accommodate a number of different styles of project management methods and use cases.

My experience with Asana(https://asana.com) goes back over 5 years to January 2015. That's longer than I realized (I just looked up my oldest tasks) and it's a lot longer than I often stick with the same SAAS service. Prior to using Asana, I reviewed a number of optinos, including Trello. Though I can't recall what specifically made me choose Asana, I do recall there being a point of needing to choose one service that looked like it would stick around, then get to using it.

Fortunately, I made a good choice. Asana has stuck around and has the platform has only improved over the last few years. An abundance of new features exist, many of which I don't utilize. The platform is flexible enough that all the features aren't entirely necessary, yet are available.

The company Asana recently filed an S-1 to go public. In a breakdown of the Asana S-1 by Tomas Tunguz, he notes how Asana invests 10% more into R&D than a competitor:

Asana runs less profitably because of meaningfully bigger investments in both Sales & Marketing (S&M) and Research and Development (R&D). Asana invests 10% more of its revenue in S&M, which is consistent with its higher growth rate. But R&D spend is of a different magnitude. Asana spends almost 2x the percentage of revenue on R&D compared to Smartsheet: 64%. Of all the companies I’ve analyzed, this is the second largest to Hortonworks.

Notably, Slack and Atlassian also fall into the top 5, and both of these businesses are flywheel models as well, so there’s some precedent for this type of investment.

As a longtime user, it's evident the Asana product continually improves, and this S-1 analysis demonstrates how they invest in developing a better product. In 2015, it wasn't obvious Asana would still exist in 2020. Thankfully they built a great product that kept users onboard for the long haul, and now it's apparent the product will be around for a longtime to come.